Tag Archives: stillness

Lathe biōsas

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Epicurus promoted an innovative theory of justice as a social contract. Justice, Epicurus said, is an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed, and we need to have such a contract in order to enjoy fully the benefits of living together in a well-ordered society. Laws and punishments are needed to keep misguided fools in line who would otherwise break the contract. But the wise person sees the usefulness of justice, and because of his limited desires, he has no need to engage in the conduct prohibited by the laws in any case. Laws that are useful for promoting happiness are just, but those that are not useful are not just…

Epicurus discouraged participation in politics, as doing so leads to perturbation and status seeking. He instead advocated not drawing attention to oneself. This principle is epitomised by the phrase lathe biōsas (λάθε βιώσας), meaning “live in obscurity”, “get through life without drawing attention to yourself”, i.e., live without pursuing glory or wealth or power, but anonymously, enjoying little things like food, the company of friends, etc.

Wikipedia

I have written here before about the benefits of living a quiet life. I am not necessarily prescribing this as a universal panacea, of course, but I am saying that it is necessary to me. I have come to realise increasingly clearly that Epicurus’ “live in obscurity” is exactly the dictum for me. The tiny daily accidents of life, the passing sounds and impressions observed during practice and after, are infinitely precious and worth attention. Birdsong, the particular exhaust note of a motorcycle on the road at the end of the garden, the half-unconscious inflection in one’s partner’s voice – all of them perfect just as they are in their crystalline presence. Things like this are simply not accessible to one who is on a mission, busy making a name for themselves.

Silence and stillness are quite different from “perturbation and status seeking”; which goes a long way to explain my own reluctance to engage with social media, with activism and campaigning, with banging and shouting in all their increasingly prevalent forms. However good the cause, anger seems only to beget anger, and violence, violence. Unkindness of whatever sort is never the way to an increase in kindness.

For myself, there is no other way than to keep still, to remain alert to the smallest things: to the leaves and the snails, to the minute changes in the weather, the slight ticking you hear as the thermostat balances the warmth of the room. Practice is no more than a way to awareness itself, to the limitless ground. Be quiet. Be still. Nothing else will do.

Plain ordinary mind

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In her beautiful essay The Gift of Contemplation, Vanessa Zuisei Goddard writes:

In The Book of Privy Counseling, the anonymous author—who also wrote the well-known Cloud of Unknowing—says: “… There is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of truth than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

…

The practice of contemplation, therefore, creates a space in which to work with our resistance so that we can choose is. And more, it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with it. Because we don’t have to like all aspects of reality. Like or dislike have nothing to do with contemplation. Yet we can learn to love reality’s isness, which means honoring ourselves and others and things and beings as we and they are. From this perspective, contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

Yesterday, I wrote of the dimensionless metaphysical ground that is Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit. I know this kind of thing can sound wilfully abstruse, and yet it is truly the simplest thing; well, except that it is no thing! To sit still, aware of nothing except what is – whether the sound of tyres on the road beyond the garden, or the continual appearance of unsought dreamy thoughts, or the solid floor beneath – is as plain and ordinary a thing as one could find to do. To remain merely aware of whatever enters the field of consciousness is not even slightly complicated, and yet it is the work of a lifetime.

To learn to love what plainly is, as Goddard says, is the foundation of equanimity, the amor fati of the Stoics. And yet, this ordinary “resting in and into what is” is the very ground of isness itself. There is no other; and yet this unvarnished awareness is itself the most utterly fundamental reality, the open ground itself, before all differentiation. It is only.

Dimensionless

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In stillness it can become apparent that the dimensionless ground, that is “before all things” (Colossians 1:17) underlies both phenomenal reality and the perception of that reality, since the mind’s original awareness – its intrinsic consciousness – is awareness of the ground itself. In this sense,

Consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.

Rebecca Goldstein, in a personal communication to Annaka Harris

As long seen in the Dzogchen concept of rigpa, the ground is both dimensionless and atemporal. It is empty, from our phenomenological point of view, even of “emptiness” itself. It is no thing, in the most utter sense of that phrase. And yet each of us can be said to have it, in the identical sense that all beings are said to have “Buddha-nature”; only our own confusion, our incessant and self-identified thoughts, get in the way as the clear light of the moon is obscured by clouds. (There is even a Dzogchen term for this too – ma-rigpa!)

Perhaps this sounds complicated. The attempt to say it gets that way; and yet it is the simplest thing. All that is needed is to remain still enough, open enough to plain awareness; the ground is open, cloudless, without end or beginning. It isn’t even there. It, simply, is.

The open door

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Thought is the result of the past acting in the present; the past is constantly sweeping over the present. The present, the new, is ever being absorbed by the past, by the known. To live in the eternal present there must be death to the past, to memory; in this death there is timeless renewal.

The present extends into the past and into the future; without the understanding of the present the door to the past is closed. The perception of the new is so fleeting; no sooner is it felt than the swift current of the past sweeps over it and the new ceases to be. To die to the many yesterdays, to renew each day is only possible if we are capable of being passively aware. In this passive awareness there is no gathering to oneself; in it there is intense stillness in which the new is ever unfolding, in which silence is ever extending with measure.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Transcript of Talk 10, Ojai, 29 July 1945

To remain still, to turn from knowing to simple awareness – without choosing, without direction, in open unknowing – really, that is all that is needed. It is so simple, so unproblematic, that we find it the most difficult thing, simply because it seems too good to be true. And yet it is the truest encounter this life affords; it is the open door to “the original primordially empty Body of Reality, the ultimate truth of the expanse” (Longchenpa). In the end, there is nothing else.

When there is nothing left

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One of the strangest realisations of contemplative practice is that the closest place to the truth is when everything is broken. Really. When the thing you thought you could never survive is upon you, when the last thing you could rely on has given way under your feet, then you can see what is actually there. Until the bridge breaks beneath you, you have no idea what is really going on at all. You have your plans, you have your resources, you have your own strength and your courage; until you don’t. Until the worst happens. And then you are free. Oliver Burkeman:

This is the point at which you enter the sacred state the writer Sasha Chapin refers to as “playing in the ruins.”

In his twenties, Chapin recalls, his definition of a successful life was that he should become a celebrated novelist, on a par with David Foster Wallace. When that didn’t happen—when his perfectionistic fantasies ran up against his real-world limitations—he found it unexpectedly liberating. The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him. Now he was free to be the writer he actually could be. When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, Chapin writes, “a precious state of being can dawn. . . . You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, OK, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day?”

When there is nothing left, the way opens. Only when you can sit still in the ruins of all you had lived for, and see what is actually there, can you begin to wake up at last.

The promise of the end of suffering is the hook that we grab on to, and for a long time after we’ve begun to practice we try to maintain our personal fantasy of what exactly that end of suffering is going to look like. But it doesn’t end up looking like what we expect—or what we want.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

All this sounds like very bad news, but in truth it is the best news possible. When what is not is gone, when our hopes and our fears turn out to be the same thing in the end, then we can see that what is is, in Thomas Merton’s words, the “little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty” that is iness itself, the open ground. And that, perhaps, is why we practice.

About time

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Real meditation isn’t something you do; it’s something you cease to do… it is the freedom to notice what is already here… What is there to notice, right now, that matters? What’s available to your powers of attention, in this moment, that is important – or even sacred? … Meditation is simply noticing what is real, as a matter of experience, now and always – but always, and only, now.

Sam Harris, from a recorded talk on Waking Up

“Self” is not a single thing in a thousand guises; it is a word for the thousand guises themselves. To understand the “self” is to understand the usage of the word within the full range of its seeming contradictory manifestations. Now it’s this, now it’s that. Only when we try to grasp an essence or assert the priority of one aspect of self-experience over another do we find ourselves entangled in philosophical brambles with very real emotional thorns. Wittgenstein repeatedly said that the job of philosophy is not to answer questions like these, but to dissolve them, to show that they are nothing but pseudo-problems thrown up by particular aspects of our language. In taking this approach to what had traditionally been seen as intractable metaphysical conundrums, Wittgenstein, I believe, comes the closest of any Western philosopher to Zen.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

The thing about the self is that it is, as Wittgenstein pointed out, another substantive noun – like time – that can lead us to mistake the word for the substance. Time does not contain, or somehow lead to, the succession of experience: it is that successive experiencing. The self does not experience a succession of events: it is the experience. To sit still is to see this unfold, in real time.

The unfolding is the sacred moment itself. As Harris points out in his talk, it would be easy to be misled by what appears to be religious language here; but the sacredness of the moment resides not in some imported framework of belief that conditions, or interprets, or redeems the time. It is sacred because it is real. It is all that can be real – all else is a memory of time past, or an anticipation of time future; and these are only dreams. The world of speculation is empty, as empty as the idea of a self. The one end is only present; it is all that is real.

Happy New Year!

No one to blame

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I’m always a bit skeptical when people talk about the increasing interest in Buddhism and the numbers of people appreciating the dharma and turning to meditation. It’s like the first week of a romance. When you first fall in love with someone—even if that person has purple hair and all kinds of what we call “extraordinary embellishments”—there’s just the feeling of love. You don’t see the blemishes; you see only the good things.

Yes, meditation and being calm and peaceful and loving, and generating compassion and doing good for others, and being more aware—these are all very good! But in the initial romantic stage, you may be looking through rose-tinted glasses. After that, you will see the hard work involved, hard work that will be done by nobody but you. This is why interest in Buddhism increases at first and then dips—and this dip is steep, because hard work will never make Buddhism very popular.

Moreover, Buddhism is the only philosophy that doesn’t have anyone to ascribe blame to but oneself for what’s wrong. Nor is there anyone but oneself responsible for producing what is good. To be put on the spot like this is not always seen as favorable by the human mind. Our cultures, social upbringing, and the design of our world condition us to hold some person or people or circumstance responsible for our situation. We have politicians to blame; we have God and the prophets, religious masters, and original sin to blame. We have many things to blame, including karma. It is very difficult to come to the point at which you see that blame is not actually logical—that everything depends on you, yourself.

Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, writing in Tricycle Magazine

Every so often I find myself longing to be able to hand over the responsibility for walking this path to someone else – divine or human – who could absolve me of the weight of all this moral, intentional, intellectual hard work. A religion would be such a comfort. And yet…

The longer I seem to be able to try to follow this way, the less it does seem to be someone’s responsibility, either mine or God’s. Yes, as Khandro Rinpoche says here, there is no one else; but responsibility, in the sense of being the one to make it work? It’s inevitable that the ego, the left-brained, thinking self, will want to take responsibility, absent someone else to lean on – but the “executive self” can’t do it, can’t even see that there is a path. Only by keeping still, by watching to see what happens – of itself – can the busy little mind be persuaded to give up. Giving the whole process names, and hence regulations, is the root of the religious impulse itself, it seems to me.

I do wonder sometimes if we aren’t going through some kind of unseen spiritual revolution at the moment. Yes, the great religions appear to be flourishing – except when they’re not –  and the purveyors of slick solutions appear to thrive, but under the radar a good deal of quiet, hidden, patient practice seems to be going on. It’s invidious to draw direct parallels, but I am often reminded of the Desert Fathers and Mothers; not in their asceticism, but in their rejection of compromise and expedience in favour of interior silence and continual practice. Who knows where this is going? But that doesn’t matter – where it is going is just the flow of the stream in its bed; this is not the time for dreams and plans, but for emptiness and quiet.

Outside the window as I write this it is dark, but pinpoints of light from the road, and across the yard by the old reservoir, prick the blackness. At this distance they can’t be seen to illuminate anything, but the little lights are there in their own brightness. It seems very still. There is nothing to do but watch.

Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.

Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness, with thanks to What’s Here Now

To sit still in winter

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Today, in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Winter Solstice, a day variously to reflect on the past year, to celebrate the season’s turning from darkness towards the light of the coming summer, and to draw together in the warmth we humans have learned to make against the long cold. It is tempting to locate its origins in the Last Glacial Maximum, when our ancestors must have been so acutely aware of their fragility in the face of the huge weight of time and climate that bore down on them, and sought with such longing for an assurance of this turning season.

Today is also the day the United Nations has set aside as World Meditation Day, celebrated for the first time this year. (Jochen Weber, writing for the Secular Buddhist Network, has an excellent and well-linked reflection on their website.)

Meditation, as far as we can tell from historical research, has been practised in something like its present form for at least 5000 years; the Winter Solstice has been celebrated, in ways we can recognise, at Neolithic sites like Newgrange and Slieve Gullion for roughly the same length of time.

To sit still in winter, to wait for the season’s turning, to watch for the coming of the light, must be one of the deepest instincts of humanity, going far back into the beginnings of our species, perhaps even of our old, old relatives from before we modern humans appeared. Sitting in my warm, lamplit room this evening I felt for a moment part of all this, no different from the long succession of humankind whose DNA still sings in my own blood; and something in me was thankful, in a way I hadn’t imagined, for warmth and life, and for the sweet succession of generations of women and men who have watched, just as I do, for the light.

Coming to be

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Time is things coming to be, that is all. It moves, or so it seems to us, in the patterning and unpatterning that is life and death. All we are ourselves is just this coming to be; bright patterns on the river surface, flickering for a few or many moments and then gone in a swirl, or settling gently back to the quiet of some pool under the dappled shade.

How could it be otherwise? How could we be master of our fate, we who are nothing but the moments of what happens to be? What could be happier than to see that we are free at last from the menacing years and the straitened gates, free to be all that we have come to be, and nothing more?

Sitting quietly by the window, in the light of the little lamp across the room, there isn’t anything but this stillness, this peace without seeking. This, for now, is all there is, and all there needs to be. What else could it be?

[The second paragraph is an answer of sorts to William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’, from which I have borrowed some images.]

Sitting by the window in the dusk

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Sitting by the window in the dusk this evening, I kept being drawn back to listen to the rain. It connected itself somehow to my breath, drifted between patches of thought, drew me back to itself softly – trickling in the guttering, pattering in the trees, the shush and splash of tyres out on the road.

Pema Chödrön, writing in Lion’s Roar:

One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” You know you will die, but you really don’t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don’t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing?

Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time…

If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate…

Another powerful way to do pause practice is simply to listen for a moment. Instead of sight being the predominant sense perception, let sound, hearing, be the predominant sense perception. It’s a very powerful way to cut through our conventional way of looking at the world. In any moment, you can just stop and listen intently. It doesn’t matter what particular sound you hear; you simply create a gap by listening intently.

I have come to love the noises through the window where I sit to practice. They are plain, familiar sounds: traffic, birdsong, the wind in the trees along the back of the garden, voices, the odd metallic clang from the yard by the old reservoir… Early in the morning, or on evenings like this one, they become their own lovely lacework realm of sound, intricate and nourishing, their texture as real as each breath, as the sensations of my body resting on the good floor. What more could one want than what is, in each instant that it’s heard? Everything is here; this precious instant is gift and grace; there is no next or before, and from that all healing springs.